Celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, Wikipedia is now well-known for having various strong biases. So how, you might ask, could a project committed to a “neutral point of view,” which in its early years featured quirky facts and honest opinions, end up being the voice of the establishment?
How? Wikipedians simply changed the meaning of neutrality. The changes were gradual, but they added up.
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In the beginning, Wikipedia acknowledged that it was reasonable for extreme minority views to receive less attention than majority views. In August 2005, Wikipedians began to discourage giving “undue weight” to discredited ideas, which became the focus of a new policy push. By August 2011, Wikipedia was quoting the BBC and brandishing the loaded term “false balance” — a concept used by left-wing journalists to justify entirely omitting “false” ideas. But this required that Wikipedia itself declare certain ideas to be false, which violated the original neutrality policy. No matter.
WIKIPEDIA AND LEGACY MEDIA COMPETE TO OUT-BIAS EACH OTHER
A similar shift took place over how to deal with “pseudoscience.” The original policy was to explain the mainstream scientific views of theories held to be pseudoscience, while also explaining what the theories themselves say. By February 2009, however, Wikipedia had officially decided to label some theories as “fringe” in its own voice, again, despite this being directly contrary to the original neutrality policy.
But, you might ask, who gets to decide which views are “false” and “fringe”? Maybe such labels are okay, if they really are applied only to “crazy talk.” And so it might have been, at first.
The answer came in the form of the policy on “reliable sources,” introduced in 2005. Which views are “false” and “fringe”? Wikipedia’s answer: those that “reliable sources” uniformly regard as false or fringe. Initially, the policy had some good points. But over the years, what “sources” were declared “unreliable” became increasingly restricted. Within a few years, Wikipedia had declared some sources “generally unreliable”; over the next decade, the screws gradually tightened. A watershed moment on the platform came in July 2018, when a giant table of so-called “perennial sources” was introduced, summarizing the results of “reliable source” discussions. At about the same time, Wikipedia began systematically reviewing and restricting most conservative and non-establishment sources.
With only establishment sources regarded as “reliable,” many views that were previously tolerated on Wikipedia were branded “fringe” because they could not be supported by “reliable sources.”
The consequences range from absurd to outrageous. With a few exceptions, the Bible and other religious writings generally cannot be used, and anything suggesting the supernatural — including rigorous academic work by confessional Bible scholars — is ignored. What happened in Gaza recently is described, in Wikipedia’s own voice, as a “genocide.” Of course, acupuncture and chiropractic are labeled “pseudoscience”; but so are osteopathy (in part) and modern approaches to the quite ancient Argument from Design for the existence of God.
The COVID-19 lab leak theory, which is now supported by many distinguished scientists, is dismissed in Wikipedia’s own voice as having “no evidence.” The article helpfully adds, “Many scenarios proposed for a lab leak are characteristic of conspiracy theories.”
The political bias that results from omitting so many conservative sources is striking and easily demonstrated. Just compare the articles about Joe Biden and Donald Trump, or look at “Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory,” “Gamergate,” or “transgender youth.” Consider just how frequently “conspiracy theorist” is applied to ordinary Republicans and conservative commentators. A 2024 Manhattan Institute study by David Rozado did a rigorous analysis showing that there was far more negative sentiment attached to right-leaning politicians than to left-leaning ones.
RIG THE HEADLINES, SHIFT THE POLLS
As icing on the cake, Wikipedia recently decided to label the GOP “a right-wing to far-right political party in the United States.” The source for the label: the V-Dem Institute, a Sweden-based academic group that polls a small but highly international roster of political science professors, who are, of course, overwhelmingly left-wing.
And the Democratic Party? It’s “center to center-left.”
Larry Sanger is the co-founder of Wikipedia. His “Nine Theses About Wikipedia” can be found at LarrySanger.org.
